


Lull

by Davechicken



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-24
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-09-01 20:24:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8636914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Davechicken/pseuds/Davechicken
Summary: He is surprised to hear her voice.





	

He is surprised to hear her voice. Or - well - hearing it is not the surprise, but hearing it unfettered and unmodified here… it is incongruous, like a single red flower in a field full of blue. 

Much like her, then. A perfect blaze of reflected light, a frame too-tall and strong. She stands out in precisely the ways he does not. (Well, other than the height.) She stands out in the way helmets turn to listen to her every order, her every command. She has their respect effortlessly (or the effort so woven into her existence as to seem linked to her very being). 

And yet.

And yet.

He walks through the wreckage of the battle. A Pyrrhic victory, one barely snatched from defeat itself. A win in name, if not in deed. 

Kylo steps between the corpses, and does not see the lives they once were. You can’t, or you go mad. 

Through the mess, and he finds her in the back of a smoking troop carrier. There’s no flickers in the Force around her, and only the barest light still in the body she’s cradling. 

People smell an awful sickening lot like food when they’re shot. The mask trickles that out, but hers is off. She’s injured, but not badly. More of interest is the sole survivor whose head she cradles in her lap.

He doesn’t have long, and they both know it. She doesn’t look up at him while she comforts the soldier, and it’s possible the man doesn’t know he’s there at all. He doesn’t need to know that a Knight of Ren is there to witness him leave this world for another. Some things are better done without knowing who is there.

The words she sings are a lullaby. He remembers hearing his own mother ring those notes out, in a different accent, a different system, a different life. Some things transcend, he supposes, as he listens to her voice ring clear and true. Pain laces through her words like liquor over ice, and he… grieves this one. This lone one.

He wonders if she mourns all of them. She can’t, surely? There are too many. Perhaps this one is a token, a symbol of all the others she could not save. He doesn’t know, but the man is gone before the song ends.

Kylo lets her gather herself before she rises, and he holds her helmet ready. She won’t meet his eyes, but she doesn’t need to.

They walk in silence to his ship, and leave.


End file.
